Stránka:roll 1911.djvu/114

Woodcraft 95 Letus be thankful that there has now arisen a new class o! boys, the scouts, who, like the knights of old, are champions of the ddeaceless, even the birds. Scouts are the birds'. police, and woe betide the lad who is caught with a nest and eggs, or the limp corpse of some leathered songster that he has slaugh- tered. Scouts know that there is no value in birds that are shot, exc. ept a few scientific specimens coRected by trained museum experts. Scouts will not com- mend a farmer for shooth? hawk or an owl as a harmful bird, even though it were see? to capture a young chicken. They will post themselves on the subject and find that most ha?ks and owls feed chiefly on field mice and large insects in- White-breasted nuthatch jurious. to the farmer's crops, and that thus, in spite o! an occasional toll on the poultry, they are as a whole of tre- mendous value. The way the birds help mankind is little short o! a marvel. A band of nuthatches worked all winter in a pear orchard near Rochester and rid the trees of a certain insect that had entirely de- s.troyed the ?rop of the pre- VIOlIS s-miner. A pair of rose-breasted grosbeal?s were seen to feed their nest of youngsters four hundred and twenty-six times in a day, each time with a billful of potato- bu?s or other insects. A pro- lessor in Washington counted two hundred and fifty tent caterpillars in the stomach of a dead yellow-billed cuckoo, and, Bluebird at entrance of nesting-box what appeals to us even more, five hundred bloodthirsty mosquitoes inside of one night-hawk. It must not be forgotten that large dry parks are among the best places for observing birds. As an example of what t-?n be accomplished, even with limited opportunities71therel? w?s a boy who happened to know where some ow/-?